by Dalia Sofer
He asked me to wait while he went in to put on his pants and boots, and we walked back out, with me following the General like one of his cadets. From across the street he examined the house, moving his head this way and that as one does after hanging a picture on a wall. I noticed the outline of my father’s torso in the top window, his face, a blur of discontent, staring me down.
“I don’t see the tilt,” said the General.
“It’s possible,” I said, “that I see things that aren’t there. Forgive me.”
He continued examining the midcentury façade. “Wait,” he said. “Look, the house number over the front door. It’s indeed tilted.” Noticing my father behind the window just then, the General offered him a military salute, which my father returned with a noncommittal civilian wave.
Back in the house the General opened a creaky door and we walked down a spiral staircase to the basement. There was a dank smell, of old things and overspent decades. He lit up a match (from the Officers’ Club) and held it up to the wall, up and down and up again. I had no idea what he was after. Soon, I saw them: deep, horizontal cracks, running across several walls. “This is bad,” the General said with no explanation. None was needed. His affirmation of my suspicions was good enough.
In the morning the world was unchanged, except for twenty centimeters of snow on the ground and the brooding silence of my father, the sore loser. He refused breakfast—even tea—and attached snow chains to his tires, setting off for the Ministry even before the General had wiped his windshield.
Feeling grateful to the General for taking me seriously, I helped him clean his car and offered to skip class in order to receive the contractor he had scheduled to inspect the house. He thanked me formally, as was his way, and asked that I report back to him at a number that he scribbled on the back of a receipt.
Hours later the contractor arrived with an engineer and two laborers. After a lengthy assessment they began to work: the foundation, they said, was sinking because of poor drainage and soil pressure, and the house was at risk of collapsing. Naturally I was afraid, but what was fear against vindication? I called the General at the number he had specified—it turned out to be his direct line at the Imperial Air Force—and I was filled with a sense of my own importance as I relayed the contractor’s diagnosis. He thanked me coolly as he had that morning, and added, “Your father should be proud.”
My father was neither proud nor pleased. At the dinner table that night his fork lingered in his rice and stew before he said, mostly to himself, “Maybe I should move my encyclopedia papers…”
“Your only concern is your papers?” my mother said.
He looked up, and pointing the fork in my direction, he said, “Why do you always create trouble?”
* * *
THE FIXERS WERE a brotherly duo named Mirza and Morteza. Mirza—the older of the two by at least a decade and clearly the boss—dictated the rhythm of the day, outlining goals and keeping track of breaks. He could have been thirty or forty years old, I couldn’t tell, and were it not for the pockmarks on his face and the premature curvature of his spine he might have been considered good-looking. His brother was both less scarred and less handsome, a balancing act of familial fate that kept the two of them tethered to modesty.
I ignored them as one ignores workers, meaning that I said hello whenever our paths crossed, and feigned minimum interest in their presence out of sheer politeness; I may have been a mediocre student at school but I had, at the very least, learned good manners. As the months went by their presence in our building was reduced to a pattern, no different than a carpet motif you see daily without actually seeing it. The holes they drilled and the dust they produced were the only reminders that they in fact existed.
* * *
AS SUMMER ARRIVED and I sat in the garden one morning reading the newspaper, I came across a cartoon by Houshang Habibi, my father’s old friend, also known as “H.” His caricatures of corrupt men and dirt-poor workers and fat kings with their henchmen were increasingly seen in the papers, a sign of the government’s efforts to distribute crumbs of freedom in the face of escalating discontent. I felt a pang of loss for my revolutionary days, and for Minoo, who had led me to them. I wanted to share the image with someone, but no one was around—they were all inside getting dressed for the annual trip to the Caspian. Given my father’s ongoing ill humor toward me, I had refused to go, and my father hadn’t objected, a snub that only strengthened my resolve to stay alone in Tehran.
When the brothers arrived in their pickup truck I showed them the drawing—a man hanging from the gallows looking down at his balloon stand, surrounded by a king and his viziers. The caption read, “The balloon seller missed the king’s jubilee.” Morteza shrugged and walked away. Mirza laughed with a half-shut mouth; he was trying to conceal a missing tooth. Afterward we remained, awkward, neither of us knowing where to go from there.
“My family is driving up north today,” I said.
He looked at me, puzzled by the disclosure. It was the first time I had spoken to him directly. After a while he said, “You’re not going?”
“I decided not to, this year,” I said. “Usually we go as a family, but sometimes it’s easier to be alone.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said.
“Do you have a family?”
“A wife and four children. All healthy, thank God.”
“Thank God,” I said. “May they be blessed. What else can we ask for but good health?” But who was speaking? I sounded nothing like myself.
“Well, I’ll get to work now,” he said, “if you’ll excuse me.”
* * *
AS MY FAMILY LOADED THE PAYKAN I stayed in the garden. I considered helping with the luggage but didn’t; I knew my father would interpret that gesture as a concession. When they were done I walked over to them, and as they said their goodbyes—my mother advised me on what to eat and how to water the plants and where to put the laundry—I turned to my father, and showing him the cartoon I said, “Your old friend H. is in all the papers these days, have you seen?”
“I’ve seen,” he said flatly.
“I guess no one is locking him up anymore.”
He didn’t answer.
“Changes must be under way,” I said.
“Why don’t you ask your new friend, the General?” said my father as he opened the front door and sat behind the wheel. He ignited the engine before my mother and Omid had even gotten into the car.
“Why should I ask the General,” I said, “when we have a government man in the family? Surely you know what’s happening just as well as he does.”
Omid gave me a sad look; for weeks he had pleaded with me not to disrupt our annual family vacation.
“All right, we’re going,” my mother said. “Take care of yourself, Hamid.”
“Maybe the house will collapse while you are on holiday,” I said, “and you’ll find me in the rubble when you return, buried with your encyclopedia.”
“I have no doubt you will remain alive and well,” said my father. “And don’t even try to get near the encyclopedia. In any case, the office door is locked.”
* * *
OVER THE ENSUING DAYS a ritual emerged: I sat with the paper in the garden with a glass of tea, and when the brothers arrived I showed Mirza the daily cartoon, usually drawn by H. Sometimes he laughed and other times he stared at the image for a few moments before smiling vaguely, which I knew was an indication that he hadn’t understood the cartoon but was too embarrassed to admit it. This mattered little; the point was that we had something to share.
When Mirza would begin his work, I, who in those days was not the expert in solitude that I would later become, would fall into restlessness. Deliverance from family could only go so far.
I’d like to believe that it was a longing for justice that made me reach, in those empty hours, for the old Lenin and Marx pamphlets I had hidden in a hatbox under my bed. But this would be untrue. What made me uncover these t
exts, at least initially, was boredom, or more accurately, loneliness. How I missed Minoo.
I read, getting lost not in language, but in ideology. If the former is water, fluid and transmutable, the latter is a boulder—hard, heavy, and unyielding. Both are made of words, but if in language words are the masters, in ideology they are the servants. This seminal difference evaded me in those days, and it was with the words of ideology that I gradually formed a self, a process that was of great comfort to a boy such as I, erratic, untethered, and, above all, ordinary. The challenge now was to find a stage on which to enact this new self, and it was at this juncture that Mirza, my morning co-browser of newspaper cartoons, became for me something more and less than a man: he became a project.
I began visiting the brothers with pomegranate juice, tea, and cakes while they drilled the foundation’s footing to install piers that would push up the sunken section of the house. Morteza accepted my offerings without interacting with me; he drank and ate and returned to work. But Mirza lingered during the breaks, and judging by how his face brightened whenever I appeared with a tray, I understood that he enjoyed my visits and in time even looked forward to them. In the beginning we spoke of the work, of how the faulty drainage of rain gutters had caused the soil beneath the house to expand and rupture the foundation. “People forget,” he said, “that the soil they build on is a living thing. It breathes and expands and contracts, like any human being.” His respect for the soil reminded me of Uncle Majid and slowly transformed my curiosity toward him into affection. Over the ensuing weeks, as we grew closer and the formality between us lessened, he disclosed many details of his biography. He was from Anzali, from a lineage of fishermen. From the days of his great-grandfather, he said, until his twelfth birthday, the Caspian fisheries were controlled by Russian families of one creed or another. By the time the fishing industry was nationalized in 1953 and the fishermen’s condition began to improve, his father had developed lung trouble and could no longer spend hours at sea. He took a job at a caviar plant, filling gold tins with sturgeon eggs. “I remember visiting him at the plant when I was a boy,” Mirza told me, “and watching as the big, sad fish would be brought in a gurney by two men. They would lay her down on a table, slice open her abdomen, and scoop out a giant, congealed mass of black eggs. It frightened me so much that I would freeze in my corner, not even moving to avoid the blood dripping on the tile floor.”
It was the first time I had thought of caviar, that centerpiece of my maternal grandparents’ table, as actual eggs, unborn, and sourced from an animal’s ovaries. The fleshiness of it disturbed me.
“Watching my father canning those tins for hours on end with his bad lungs made me want to do something, anything…” Mirza continued as he sat on the bottom step of his ladder, sipping his tea. He slurped as he drank, a sound that irritated me, but which I pretended to ignore. The absence of social graces, I decided, was not going to upset our budding friendship. “I was the first in my family,” he added, “to leave the region and relocate to Tehran, a move that my brother followed. But I had only a second-grade education…”
I asked him if he was happy with his decision and for some time he didn’t answer. “It hasn’t been easy,” he finally said.
This was my opening. I spoke to him—as I had once been spoken to at so many safe house meetings—of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, of the polarization of the classes, of the corruption of the educational system by capitalist societies such as our own. For the first few days he seemed intrigued. But as my lectures became longer and more fiery, he began drifting away, finding excuses to cut me short and return to work, because, he said, the General was on their backs to finish up.
“Why be afraid of the General?” I said one evening as he was gathering his belongings and preparing to leave for the night.
“The General pays my wages,” he said.
“He pays you,” I said, “but not enough. He is exploiting you. Didn’t you tell me that you and your wife and four children live in two rooms, like so many canned tomatoes?”
“I did tell you that we live in two rooms,” he said. “But the thought of canned tomatoes is yours, not mine. The General’s money feeds my family,” he continued as he walked past me. “Who else will pay, you?”
“You’re missing the big picture,” I said. “It’s not about the General, or you, or any other individual. It’s about a system.”
“I don’t know systems,” he said. “I know that I have a wife and four children who need food and clothes and medicine.” He got in his car and rolled down the window. “Oh, and I lied about their health,” he added. “My youngest has bad lungs, like her grandfather, and needs a special drug from France. I don’t have time for your lectures, Hamid-agha. Shab-bekheyr—have a good night.”
14
THIS MUCH WAS TRUE: I had meant well, in the beginning.
After the stinging words with Mirza I decided to set off on a trip. I could not become a real revolutionary by lecturing to one man in my own backyard; to change the world I first needed to witness it. But where to go, and how? After a day or two of brooding, I concluded that the destination didn’t matter; the point was to act. Access to cash wasn’t an obstacle either—my parents kept an emergency stash in a lacquer box in the second drawer of their bedroom dresser. The bills added up to a respectable amount, though not enough for a car and expenses. I considered taking the bus or the train, but there was something pathetic about public transport in a situation like this.
That’s when I had an idea.
At the bakery I had seen a flyer announcing the sale of an old motorbike—a refurbished Harley-Davidson XA, a World War II souvenir left behind by American troops. When I called the listed number, the seller, a French diplomat whose appointment had come to an end, explained that though he had painstakingly revamped the motorcycle and had grown fond of it, he wished to be rid of his belongings as quickly as possible and would offer a good price. I bought the motorcycle that same afternoon, and after practicing nonstop for two weeks, I set off on an exploratory mission, imagining myself a modern-day Che. I rode northward, to Mazandaran and Gilan, then south, through Sanandaj, Kermanshah, and down the coast to Bushehr, then back north through Yazd, Isfahan, and Qom. I met, along the way, workers and merchants, itinerants and hashish smokers, snot-nosed rural children with barefoot mothers who tricked me into believing that I was a benevolent man. In Anzali, the birthplace of Mirza, an old fisherman told me that Qajar rulers once leased bulk fishing in the Caspian provinces to local governors who then would sublease them to private entrepreneurs. For decades, he said, the fishing lease belonged to the Russian-Armenian Lianozov family, and later to another Russian named Vanitsof. “They say the Lianozovs made half a million rubles before the October Revolution. They went on to build a massive petroleum company in Baku. You see,” he said, “the Qajars used the land like their private bank account.”
I asked him what he thought of the current situation. He looked around, cautious. “There has been some improvement,” he finally said, “but the profit, in the end, is always elsewhere. You understand?” I said that I understood very well. “Still,” he added, “we are lucky up here. We have the beautiful sturgeons and their black pearls, and so much bounty besides. Rice, chicken, milk…” As we parted I offered him a photocopy of the Lenin pamphlet. He accepted my gift but confessed he couldn’t read. His son, he said, might be able to make out a word or two.
* * *
IT WAS IN QOM that my imagination made a turn. By the seminary gates, where I had parked, a young man in a robe and turban stood admiring my motorcycle. “It’s an old clunker,” I said, “but has served me well. I’ve been riding all over the country.”
He asked me what had prompted my road trip and I told him that I was searching for answers, which, being a seminary man, he interpreted as a quest for God. “It’s a different kind of quest,” I said. “I want to understand what’s happening in this land. The dam is about to break. But there are
many questions. Why is it breaking, why now, and how best to direct the floodwaters that will come pouring?” He asked me how I was educating myself on the pesky questions of injustice, and I told him about my readings, of Marx and Hegel and Lenin.
“You are imposing Western ideas onto Eastern problems,” he said. “We have to arrive at social justice our own way. The foundation of our religion is social justice—think of Imam Hossein, martyred as he was. Or Imam Reza. We are the religion of the downtrodden. Everything we seek is in our own house, yet we insist on being elsewhere.” He then spoke of an Ayatollah—“the light of the nation’s eye,” he called him—in exile in Najaf since 1965. “Have you heard of him?” he said. I told him I hadn’t. “No matter,” he continued, “you will soon.”
He explained, with much excitement, that two summers earlier, on the fifteenth day of Khordad in the year 1354, right there in the holy city of Qom, hundreds of seminary students—himself included—had gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the Ayatollah’s exile, calling for his return. Rightly assuming that I was not fluent in the Hijri calendar and would be more comfortable with the Gregorian one, he added with a smile, “That’s June 5, 1975, for you.”
The police, he continued, secret and otherwise, responded with water cannons and tear gas, and they closed off all the roads leading to the seminary, so that the townspeople could not join the protests. But the fight continued into the night, and by morning everyone knew that the regime had violated the seminary. Newspapers—meaning the state—blamed Communist forces for the protests. “This was absurd,” my young interlocutor said. “And yet, if you think about it, what we and the Ayatollah want isn’t so different from what the Marxists and all those liberal democrats are calling for: social justice. On this we can all agree, can’t we?”